All of these are complex cultural phenomena they are not reducible to biology. By using terms like “virus,” “invasive species,” “tentacular,” and “ecology,” I do not mean to conflate culture with biology. In the process, I will address the question of what QAnon is (referring to its relationship to science, to art, and to religion) and how it fits into the larger “ecology” or “ economy” of knowledge, trust, and meaning that some describe as the “ post-truth condition.”Ĭaveat 1. This post will focus on the role of a specific practice, called “research,” within the spread of the “cultural virus” of the QAnon movement, and on the ways that the “virus” spreads tentacularly, that is, along multiple lines of infection into multiple host bodies. And we need to understand conspiracy theory as practice and not only as theory. To understand how they do this, we need to understand the global media ecology, which is itself so new and rapidly evolving that few understand it well, even if we all participate in it in different ways and to different degrees. Like invasive species, they spread into diverse cultural ecosystems, colonizing them even as they take on new forms that mimic each environment’s original inhabitants. Conspiracy movements like QAnon are a kind of cultural virus that spreads rapidly and widely in the new global media environment.
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